What do Holy Women do with their time?

v  We study the gospel

v  We teach the gospel

v  We provide comfortable, loving, well maintained homes by:

• Cooking nutritious meals, and seeing that our family eats together
• Decorating our homes, on a budget, in a pleasing way
• Controlling our spending urges and budgeting our money
• Entertaining missionaries, home and visiting teachers, youth, and others
• Using all the skills necessary to achieve the ideal of heaven on earth

v  We serve our families

v  We serve others

v  We fill our own pitchers with new knowledge and socialization

v  We save our kindred dead

v  We prepare our families for the future

v  We listen to the prophets and learn ways to obey

v  We teach and testify to the rising generations

Relief Society is not just a Sunday lesson. It is a group of like-minded women seeking after the same goals. Relief Society sisters can help one another achieve these goals, finding ways to strengthen one another, sharing talents, skills, knowledge, and helping one another face the world, and ultimately overcome it.

The world encroaches upon our time, so Relief Society must be at-the-ready to call the sisters back into holy activities. Not wasteful activity—Holy, and worthy, activity.

A Relief Society group should have an ongoing calendar of a variety of activities available so sisters are continuously learning, and being involved, in the work. Or else the world will carry our beloved sisters away into the mists of despair. A series of group classes, or projects, will keep sisters focused where her heart belongs. Our Relief Society general leaders have invited us to not demand too much time away from family, so they suggest inviting small groups to pick from an assortment of options. Small groups should have the opportunity to report their accomplishments to the main group, so all can share in the achievements of others.

Having “once-a-month” classes no longer strengthens our sisters as it once did. Many of our sisters can’t be bothered with “one more thing to do this month!”  With the pressing draw of the world, and its excitements, we would do well to challenge our sisters on the homefront; strengthening them, offering a support system, challenging them to focus on holy activities that will bring them out of the world. This requires much more than a “once-a-month” activity. You will find that offering small, casual get togethers is actually less time-consuming, involves only those who are truly interested, and allows sisters freedom to set and achieve a range of purposeful goals that will ultimately strengthen their home.

A Relief Society president who allows this sense of freedom of learning may find it difficult to let go the reins. By focusing on a consistent variety of multiple opportunities and delegating the calendaring to all the sisters in the ward, all will find a greater sense of sisterhood, a more complete and whole objective toward purposes of value, and a unified effort toward holy pursuits. A beehive, if you will, where everyone has a responsibility, a project, a vital offering, and a purpose. Our Relief Societies can be filled with women working toward a solid, testimony-filled power capable of “honeycombing” her family toward salvation.

This painting, by Sue Bagwell, is called Four Holy Women.